Deputy Mayor, former Village Manager, indicted and arrested on numerous charges

Friday

Nov 9, 2012 at 2:23 PMNov 9, 2012 at 2:26 PM

Victor Whitman

MONTICELLO – Deputy Monticello Mayor T.C. Hutchins and former Village Manager John LiGreci were arrested Friday and indicted on a charges of coercion and official misconduct, accused of committing crimes while attempting to hire a friend of Hutchins’ as a patrol officer.Hutchins, LiGreci and Monticello resident Kariem McCline were driven to the Sullivan County Courthouse in police cruisers and led into the courtroom in handcuffs, where a 13-count indictment was unsealed by Judge Frank LaBuda. Hutchins and LiGreci, a former town of Lumberland supervisor and chairman of the county Republican committee, were charged with two counts of first-degree coercion, a felony that carries a sentence of up to seven years in prison on conviction. LiGreci is charged with a second felony of falsifying business records. Both were charged with multiple counts of misdemeanor official misconduct. LiGreci was fired last month by the village. McCline’s initial hiring, and then non-hiring, was a messy process played out behind the scenes through most of 2011 into this summer. Police opposed McCline as a candidate because he had drug convictions as a youthful offender. Hutchins sat on the newly formed police commission. McCline was Hutchins’s friend and once worked under him a decade ago at the Goshen Secure Center. According to the indictment, in September 2011, LiGreci ordered former Chief Doug Solomon to stop the background check before it was finished. McCline was offered conditional employment six days later, on Oct. 4, 2011. Ultimately, County Personnel Officer Carolyn Hill stopped the process. McCline was preparing to file a federal civil rights lawsuit against the police department and the county. According to the indictment, LiGreci and Hutchins knew about the planned lawsuit and tried to help McCline, while also attempting to interfere in Farrell’s investigation. Hutchins and LiGreci are accused of ordering Lt. Mark Johnstone, then the acting chief, to answer six questions about what he had done during McCline’s background investigation and reveal confidential information about Farrell’s investigation. Johnstone knew that McCline was preparing sue the village and he felt that LiGreci and Hutchins were “were seeking to aid and benefit McCline in his threatened civil litigation,” the indictment says. LiGreci later accused Johnstone “of illegal conduct” for communicating with Hill around the time she intervened in the hiring. LiGreci is also accused of using village monies to pay a psychiatrist $2,700 for McCline’s third psychological evaluation without board authorization. McCline was given an unprecedented three psychological exams, and the village also took the unusual step of hiring a psychiatrist from outside the area at $400 an hour. Most of these evaluations cost $250. LiGreci was also accused of trying to conceal this payment by entering it under two police budget lines. McCline has been charged with felony counts of offering a false instrument for filing, making an apparently sworn false statement and misdemeanor falsifying records, accused of lying on his application to the village and giving false statements to a judge when he applied for a pistol permit in 2009. LaBuda sent the three men to the Sullivan County Jail on $5,000 bail or bond. All three have temporarily been assigned legal aid attorneys and are expected to make bail later this afternoon. Mayor Gordon Jenkins couldn’t immediately be reached but sent other board members a memo that Hutchins had been removed as the deputy mayor.

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